Word: motifs
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...Another motif which runs throughout both books is the shocking and unnecessary heavy-handedness with which Israelis have dealt with the Arabs. The fates of two villages, as reported in both books, Deir Yasin and Kfar Kassim, demonstrate the extremes to which this policy could be carried. Deir Yasin has become the well-known rallying cry of the Palestinian resistance; on April 9, 1948, the terrorist bands Lehi and Irgun Zvai Leumi--the latter under Menahim Begin's leadership--massacred some 250 Arabs. But Deir Yasin is merely the most remembered of several massacres that summer which were intended...
Romance has not just gone crazy in the City of the One Night Stands, it's gone kaput, period. The most unsettling facet of this death-of-love motif is the pervasiveness of its reality among the film's otherwise diverse characters. The malaise afflicts the professionally fulfilled executive (Harvey Keitel) as deeply as his hopelessly unfulfilled housewife (Geraldine Chaplin), who fancies herself a modernday Camille, running around spouting melodrama and sipping Carroll's Southern Comfort between lines. It fails to discriminate between John Considine's hail-fellow-well-met furniture dealer and Carradine's petulant artiste. With one noteworthy...
Garden Shears. The robe is not a completely new motif for Dine. It goes back to 1964, when he saw an ad illustrating one in the New York Times. "There was nobody in the bathrobe," he later remarked, "but when I saw it, it looked like me. I thought I was in it." It became, in effect, a kind of self-portrait without the self, with the slightly eerie aspect of a snake's shucked skin. The bathrobe in Dine's new paintings confronts the eye with a proprietorial air, the folds straight and columnar, the sleeves akimbo...
...Late for the Sky, he relies upon one image--the dark and silent gate--throughout the song. The remainder of the lyrics are direct but dull: "The only thing that makes me cry, is the kindness in my baby's eye." And the music functions only as a background motif for Browne's poetry, which isn't really worth spotlighting. Drummer Jeff Porcara could easily be pounding away with one hand tied behind him, and pianist Craig Doerge is no Rick Wakeman. Once the violin is added, the song's mushiness begins to resemble overcooked cream of wheat...
...mine from high school. Cheryl Stern seemed to my bulged eyes a new woman When last I had admired her comely self she had been a sweet kid in puffy sleeves with pastel flannel figures of Babar the Elephant and his wife Celeste sewn on as a running motif across the apron of her party dress. Now, svelte and shiny in her silk fishnet dress with a fishnet choker and fishnet stockings, she was quite a different item. She looked like a captive eel at the Fulton Fish Market...